SMAS is the short title for “Development
and Application of a Safety Monitoring and Assurance System for Chilled
Meat Products” action project, coordinated by the
National
Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and running from 2003-2006.
It is funded by the European Commission under the key action of Food,
Nutrition and Health of the “Quality of Life and management of
living resources” thematic programme, and the “Quality monitoring
and traceability throughout the food chain” thematic priority,
project number QLK1-2002-02545.

7 Institutes/companies are
working on the 6 main interrelating workpackages
of SMAS project. The aim of this research project is to develop reliable
and practical Time Temperature Integrators (TTI)
systems and establish their applicability as safety monitors of meat products
from manufacture to consumption.

A Safety Monitoring and Assurance System (SMAS) for
meat products will be developed. SMAS integrates kinetic
models for dominant meat pathogens and spoilage bacteria, risk assessment
techniques and the capacity to monitor single product temperature history
with Time Temperature Integrators (TTI), into
an effective chill chain decision and management tool. TTI of
high accuracy and suitable design for safety monitoring will be developed
and optimised. Models will be refined for reliable prediction of meat
safety and spoilage.

SMAS will be validated in real conditions and provide
the meat sector the ability to control its weak link, the chill chain,
and deliver to the consumer's table safe meat products of high hygienic
quality. It will satisfy the consumer that state-of-the-art methods and
technology can guarantee him low risk-high quality meat products and thus
help restore the image and increase competitiveness of the EU meat sector.

The expected overall result of the application of the SMAS
chill chain management system can be visualized by the narrowing of the
distribution of the probability of illness and the reduction or elimination
of unacceptable products from quality point of view at the time of consumption.

The blue line shows the significant reduction of illness
probability (fig a) and the quality improvement of chilled meat products
(fig b) when SMAS system is applied